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Political Corruption and Public Activism: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Analysis

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Abstract

We study a two-population evolutionary game that models the role of public activism as a deterrent to political corruption. In particular, suppose that politicians can choose whether or not to engage in corruption, lowering the public good in exchange for personal gain, and citizens can choose whether or not to engage in public activism for corruption reform, influencing the rate of detection and severity of punishment of corrupt politicians. We study the Nash equilibria of this game and also conduct static and dynamic evolutionary analyses.

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Notes

  1. Though not directly related to our work, others have demonstrated empirically that information imperfections and search costs affect the incentive to be corrupt. For example, Accinelli and Carrera [7] studies whether preconceived notions about the prevalence of corruption influenced players’ decisions to be corrupt in a simulation. Despite telling participants the actual proportion of corruption, they determined that the original biased opinions correlate strongly with the players’ choices.

  2. Though not obvious, there are empirical and theoretic reasons to think that a politician may imitate others when he or she chooses to be corrupt. A persistent finding in corruption literature is that political corruption reinforces itself. This suggests that politicians may follow the behavior of those around them, reinforcing changes in corruption. For example, Accinelli and Carrera [1] note that “Mexico is a real nice example of corrupt behavior driven by imitation, i.e., to be corrupt if others are also corrupt...”.

  3. An interesting extension of Ubeda and Duéñez-Guzmán [36] is presented in Duénez-Guzmán and Sadedin [16]. Here the authors conclude that in the presence of psychological or status-related benefits to being a monitor, society could reasonably travel from an unstable equilibrium of cooperating civilians and monitors to a stable equilibrium of strictly cooperating monitors.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Charles Steele for his careful reading of an early draft of this paper. We would also like to thank the reviewers, whose incisive comments helped us to greatly improve this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hillsdale College, 33 E. College Street, Hillsdale, MI, 49242, USA

    W. C. Abram

  2. Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA

    K. Noray

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  1. W. C. Abram
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  2. K. Noray
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Correspondence to W. C. Abram.

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This work was partially supported by the Hillsdale College LAUREATES Research Program.

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Abram, W.C., Noray, K. Political Corruption and Public Activism: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Analysis. Dyn Games Appl 8, 1–21 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13235-017-0214-x

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